Movie Time with JonnyT: Spiderman: Homecoming

Spiderman: Homecoming is the newest film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) that debuted on July 7th, it is directed by Jon Watts and stars Tom Holland as the titular character.

Everything I’m about to say in a nutshell: It’s was ok, needs more screen time with some characters, less of others and there is a bit too much action that ends up bogging it all down. Also some nice things.

So I wanted to take a minute to elaborate/articulate on the specific things (not going into spoilers don’t worry) that I felt really weighed down the newest iteration of the friendly neighborhood superheros film career. I’m doing this partly because I’m see a bit too much of near blind praise for it, also it’s a movie I saw, of course I want to talk about it. What on earth else am I supposed to do with this blog? Talk about MY life? LUL PASS

For me the biggest problem is that a lot of the minor characters fell entirely flat, because they just weren’t on screen enough to evolve past being tropes or plot devices, so it’s one-hundred percent not the fault of the performances. The worst instance of this in my mind is Zendaya as Michelle. Her character appears on screen, drops a one-liner that makes fun of whatever is going on, and then she disappears for another twenty minutes until the next punchline needs to be delivered.

Uhh….. what? Like I get what they’re going for, something like a very smart, snarky and kinda aloof person that keeps Peter’s optimism in check. Instead I felt like it was just an apathetic jerk who gets to exist because the writers had some good jokes they wanted put in the movie. Would’ve been nice if she had something else to do other than drop those punchlines.

Also remember all the hype and excitement when they announced that Donald Glover was gonna be in this movie? Yeah he’s got a whole two scenes and is never more than a plot device. I just feel like if you’re gonna make a big deal about bringing someone on they should at least have more to do then telling the hero where they go next. I don’t know about you, but if I got Donald Glover into my movie and made a fuss about it, I’d probably have him do more than tell the hero where to go next. Just me though.

Giving these characters more to do doesn’t even have to stretch the runtime. (which is a bit too long.) you can just cut back on the Happy (Jon Favreau’s character) shenanigans. Like when did Marvel decide to take Happy from regular dude that Tony Stark bounced ideas off of to the bumbling moron seen in Homecoming? Just really unimpressive stuff in my mind.

Next up the film needed some trimming at the beginning and the midpoint. There is a sequence that occurs a bit before the half way point as I remember that’s just really long and even though it lets us see how powerful Vulture is as a bad guy and its great, it could’ve been like half the length is was. Also the first like three minutes are this vlog styled thing where Peter records some of the events of Civil War from his point of view, and while it’s kinda cute it doesn’t really add anything to the movie so you could’ve just cut it all out.

Also while were at it, can we cut the Stan Lee cameos? Please? They stopped being good after like Spiderman 2.

There are some really good things in this movie as well. Namely Michael Keaton brings the absolute best villain portrayal yet seen in the Marvel films. (OUT OF THE WAY LOKI!) It was almost stunning to have a bad guy in which I understood who they were as a person, his motivations and why he wanted to fight Spiderman.

Tom Holland also continues to be a brilliant Spiderman. Sorry Toby and Andrew, but Tom’s got the both of you beat on pretty much all fronts. #Sorrynotsorry

Spiderman: Homecoming tries to break away from the typical Marvel formula, even if it’s not as far as I would’ve liked them too. At least they’re trying new things, even though they didn’t work as well this time. I haven’t lost faith in the MCU because of this movie, I’ll see if they can actually do anything interesting with Thor before I throw in the towel entirely on them.

I can’t recommend that you go out of your way to see this movie though. If your friends invite you to check it out on Tuesday cheap night, you won’t regret it, but you don’t need to make it a point to see this one. Thanks for reading, have a great day and make some good choices (Maybe like following me on Twitter/Instagram? Hmm… that doesn’t feel very right. Oh well shameless self promotion is the way we do things these days.)